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Comment by AndrewBissell | Hacker News Reader

Nothing in your link supports the claim "we know the vaccine improves survival regardless of previous infections."

> It doesn't matter in countries like the US where the vaccine is free to anyone who wants it

How about the medical bills for a life-altering adverse event? Are those free for anyone who has to pay them? These considerations matter when we're talking about administering a vaccine which may provide very slim or no additional protection over natural immunity. There has already been one study suggesting the second dose of Pfizer even reduces cellular and humoral immune response.

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There’s a CDC study that shows vaccinating while previously infected, further boosts your immunity by more than double https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2021/s0806-vaccination-pr...

What they don’t mention is that previous infection alone is at least as good as vaccination alone. According to data from Israel, previous infection is about 6x more effective in fact. https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2021/s0806-vaccination-pr...

Given that, I don’t at all agree with the conclusion of that CDC study that you HAVE to get vaccinated if you had a previous infection.

What that study shows is that unvaccinated people in the study cohort were twice as likely to experience a reinfection. A lot of things could explain that and it's a far cry from establishing that it boosts immunity. The study period was also during the point when effectiveness of the initial mRNA vaccine doses was probably peaking.

> How about the medical bills for a life-altering adverse event?

Like when you get seriously ill with Covid and have to be hospitalized in the ICU? That's more likely than an adverse reaction to a vaccine, if we're assuming that everyone will get Covid at some point.

We're specifically discussing people with immunity from having recovered from a prior Covid infection, in whom serious life-altering illness from a reinfection is also extraordinarily rare.

> in whom serious life-altering illness from a reinfection is also extraordinarily rare.

Only as far as we're talking about reinfections from currently known variants. We've seen that current vaccines are still pretty good against Delta despite not being tailored to it. Is it not possible for vaccines to provide immunity against a future variant that's much deadlier upon reinfection?

oh sorry how many of those life altering adverse events have there been as a percentage of people vaccinated?

How many extremely bad disease outcomes have there been as a percentage of all Covid reinfections?

Link the study or delete your comment.

Here you go. Wonder what a third dose will do!

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.03.22.436441v1

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